19 November 2018 – Astronauts can now do complex installations of space hardware following the step-by-step guidance of a “mobile procedure viewer” or mobiPV strapped to their hand.
One of Telespazio VEGA UK’s employees, David Marinez Olivera, lead ESA engineer for mobiPV, has been working with Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality systems for space applications at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESA/ESTEC) in the Netherlands for over 10 years.
MobiPV is a complex distributed system which has taken seven years to develop, first demonstrated in 2015 by astronaut Andreas Morgansson, and now a fully functional collaborative procedure viewer. David’s contribution involved a mix of mobile development, network programming, multi-media and distributed systems design.
“The interesting thing about this system is that it is based on TCP/IP so we can build applications as we would for the internet”, commented David, following the recent use of mobiPV by astronaut Alexander Gerst as he installed a life-support rack on the International Space System.
Read further details about the successful hands-free use of mobiPV in space